Keir should make Miliband Chancellor
J Sorel
Keir Starmer should end the speculation and make Ed Miliband his new Chancellor of the Exchequer, because at this point the prime minister would be better off being woke. Miliband is reportedly pitching himself for the job, so why not? Starmer has no intention of carrying out the Blue Labourist agenda which might yet preserve Labour as a national force; much better, then, to try to consolidate enough of the left-wing vote to force a hung parliament in 2029.
For Sir Keir, 2025 has been a long series of capitulations to the Labour Party’s soft left. Miliband has been permitted to run the Department for Energy as a virtual state-within-a-state, ignoring Downing Street’s orders and pursuing policies totally at odds with the Government’s nominal agenda. Keir should now make this capitulation formal. A Miliband Chancellorship would abandon Reeves’ old talk of fiscal discipline and the largely toothless attempts at welfare reform. As the second most important job in the Government Miliband’s appointment would act as an order of march to the entire ministry, opening the door to, inter alia, a customs union with Europe, no reform of SEND, “no surrender” on net zero, no disapplication of the ECHR on illegal immigration, and a fudged Rotherham Inquiry.
There is still an audience for this kind of politics. Australia’s Anthony Albanese and Spain’s Pedro Sanchez are both running a defiantly 2010s agenda to surprising success. Sanchez has sharply increased immigration, and yet is still somewhat competitive in the polls. Such an agenda can no longer win outright – in Europe at least. What it can do is consolidate a narrowing base and preserve the centre-left as part of a wider cordon sanitaire. A Miliband Chancellorship would mean Labour’s transformation into a much more continental-style outfit: that is to say, a sectional party of the public sector middle classes which engages in post-election bartering with Green, Liberal, and Christian Democrat factions to keep the populists out. The implicit alliance with the Welsh Nationalists at the Caerphilly by-election earlier this year was a first murmur of this new strategy.
Miliband himself seems to recognise this. There is something self-conscious about, among other things, his decision to ban North Sea oil and gas exploration; as if he wants to prove to himself and others that this type of politics is still possible in the mid-2020s. “Yeah, whaddya think of THAT,” his every action seems to say. Aware that the future of the left in Britain is a motley alliance of disparate groups, he feels no need to address himself to the nation at large, and can instead work on shoring up the core vote.
Opponents will say that Miliband as Chancellor will render Starmer a decorative figure. Keir Starmer has never evinced any desire to be anything other than a decorative figure. No person is more attached to the mere forms of office – the trips abroad, the state dinners. His first act was to ask civil servants if they had any ideas for policies. Sue Gray, Morgan McSweeney – Ed Miliband will merely be the latest jailer to this most willing of prisoners.
When Miliband himself was leader of the Labour Party from 2010 to 2015 attempts were made to turn him into a weighty and serious figure who could speak for the nation. These ended in ridicule. He only earned a certain, if sectional, popularity by embracing who he really was – in his case, an unapologetic geek and wonk. His party should now learn from his example.